Monday, February 04, 2013

Where did January go?

So January blew right by without me blogging at all. I'd even pledged to myself to at least post a weekly recap of interesting links and news, but here's at least a monthly recap:

Thinkamingo

I've been busy at Thinkamingo, working on some new app projects that haven't been published yet. I also shipped Name Dice for Android and the Amazon / Nook versions shouldn't be too much longer. I shipped updates to our Sports Card apps to fix numerous bugs and expand the color choices for the included card template. Behind the scenes, I also consolidated the separate copy-n-paste XCode projects into one reasonably well-managed project with targets for each app. That should hopefully scale when we add additional sports. Finally, I submitted ports of our Android apps (Lists for Writers, Story Dice, Name Dice) to the BlackBerry app store using their Android runtime. It took a few slight changes, mostly to handle different market links, but it was fairly quick and easy.

FIRST Tech Challenge

Team Brick Buddies has been busy getting ready for their league championship and the upcoming state championship. At the league championship, the robot ran fairly well except for a flakey NXT cable. Between strong driving, a solid robot, and a little luck, they finished qualifying rounds 4-2 and in 3rd place. They picked a good alliance partner in Team Duct Tape and went on to win in the semifinals. In the finals against Masquerade and Maelstrom, two very strong teams from Middleton High School, they fought hard but lost. In judging they did well and were finalists in multiple categories but finished in second place behind Masquerade for the overall judging for the Inspire Award. They'll likely head into the state championship in 5th-7th place in the state (out of 72 teams). They clearly have some work to do if they want to really push the top teams and fight for a spot at the world championships.

Geek Calendar

I've been meaning to try to set up a "geek calendar" of some sort with upcoming techie-style local events for developers and parents. Here's my first set of events: Tampa Bay Geek Calendar.

About Me

Hi. My name is Jon Adair and I'm a geek. This is my oft-neglected personal blog.

I'm the co-founder of Thinkamingo where we build fun and educational mobile apps. I do product planning, coding, graphic design, and marketing. I'm married with two homeschooled kids, so there's very little "free time" outside of their activities. I've been active in several ministries at Van Dyke United Methodist Church especially children's ministry. I am also a ham (AI4DG) and do disaster relief and community service volunteer work through several organizations.